Exclusive: USAID encouraged outgoing staff to apply for jobs at secretive Gaza-focused foundation
Document shows AID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance encouraged staff to seek employment at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, at request of interim director and former AID official John Acree.
On Wednesday night the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial U.S.-backed and Israeli-linked replacement for United Nations-affiliated humanitarian aid into Gaza, sent an “urgent” message to journalists around the world regarding what it described to be a deadly attack on its team.
“Tonight, at approximately 10 p.m. Gaza time, a bus carrying more than two-dozen members of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation team, local Palestinians working side-by-side with the U.S. GHF team to deliver critical aid, were brutally attacked by Hamas,” the email opened. The message further stated that, “there are at least five fatalities, multiple injuries, and fear that some of our team members may have been taken hostage,” though The New York Times reported that it was not able to immediately verify the claims.
According to a document exclusively obtained by this publication, at least one official within the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) of the recently gutted U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has encouraged its outgoing employees to apply for jobs at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The internal recruitment was said to have come at the behest of GHF interim executive director John Acree, who was previously a senior country representative for AID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, Iraq. BHA’s unofficial recommendation to its staff took place alongside a report from Reuters last week that the State Department has considered routing $500 million to GHF through USAID.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been embroiled in crises since its announcement, serving as an opaque offshoot of a previous vehicle inspection project along Gaza’s Netzarim corridor operated by former CIA and U.S. Special Forces-led private security firms Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions. The original executive director of GHF, former Marine Jake Wood, abruptly resigned immediately prior to the foundation’s initial aid deliveries into Gaza late last month, which quickly deteriorated into the Israeli military killing dozens of Gazan civilians roughly one kilometer from an aid distribution site in Rafah. The foundation has refused to clarify where its funding originates — following in the footsteps of Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions — but rejected speculation from Israeli politicians that the Israeli foreign intelligence service, known as the Mossad, is the quiet backer.
Wood’s resignation followed reporting in The New York Times revealing that Safe Reach Solutions CEO Philip F. Reilly, a former chief of the CIA’s special activities division, had drafted the plans while working for the CIA-affiliated private intelligence firm Orbis Operations last year, in collaboration with several Israeli intermediaries. (Reuters subsequently confirmed that the parent company of Orbis Operations, McNally Capital, has invested in GHF, and The Washington Post reported on the withdrawal of Boston Consulting Group.)
The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance encouraging its staff to seek employment with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Details of the obtained internal BHA recruitment are being withheld due to sensitivities resulting from the small number of staff who have remained since the second Trump administration’s deep cuts to the agency.
Just completely depraved... though the regime replacement and destabilizing majority of USAID was already there so maybe that's who that was targeted at.